Eileen Ford - Early Life

Early Life

Eileen Ford, née Otte, grew up on the north shore of Long Island, New York. Eileen was a model during the summers of her freshman and sophomore years at Barnard College, modeling for the Harry Conover modeling agency, one of the first in the United States. She graduated from Barnard in 1943. In 1944, she met her future husband Jerry (Gerard Ford), at a drugstore near the Columbia University campus and married him in November 1944 in San Francisco. After eloping, Jerry, who was in the Navy, was shipped out for WWII. While Jerry was gone, Eileen became photographer Elliot Clark's secretary, a fashion stylist, a copywriter, and a fashion reporter for the Tobe Report.

Meanwhile in 1946, model Dorian Leigh left New York's Harry Conover agency because of his inefficient phone system. Dorian's clients had a difficult time reaching a Conover secretary on the phone to book her. Because of this, Dorian told Conover she was leaving and that she would hire her own secretary to take her modeling phone calls instead. Soon, a handful of models used Dorian's secretary. She then applied for a license because technically, it was a modeling agency at that point. At a fashion photographer's studio, Dorian met Eileen, who was fascinated how Dorian's modeling agency worked. Dorian explained that models had to manage their own invoices and billings, and often, the clients that models worked for, would take weeks, months, or even years to pay them for their work, if at all. Dorian told Eileen that she came up with the idea of a "voucher system." With this system, the agency was in charge of getting models jobs and keeping track of their billings. The models would be paid every Friday by the modeling agency, regardless whether the clients paid for the model's work on time or not, minus the agency's 10-20% fee. Eileen, also a former Conover model, was intrigued by Dorian's voucher idea.

An interesting fact is that Conover's onetime modeling business partner was also named Jerry Ford, who thirty years later became President Gerald Ford.